The photographer will present at CAM March 25

The
FotoFocus Lecture and Visiting Artist Series at Cincinnati Art Museum will
feature photographer Roe Ethridge on March 25 at 7 p.m.
According
to FotoFocus, Ethridge — who works in both commercial and fine art photography
— draws upon the descriptive power of photography and the ease with
which it can be accessed, duplicated and recombined. He is considered a
post-Modernist.
His
work has been shown in such venues as MOMA/PS1, London's Barbican Center,
Carnegie Museum of Art Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art, the 2008 Whitney
Biennial (2008); and the Museum of Modern Art. In 2011 he was a finalist for
the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize.
His
presentation at the museum is free and reservations are not required, though
parking for non-museum members is $4. More info here.

“Forgotten” Japanese art collection returns to the Cincinnati Art Museum

When an art museum has a collection of
more than 65,000 objects, it isn’t surprising that many of them wind up
hidden in storage. Sometimes complete collections are stowed there,
rarely if ever seen or studied.

Delving
into Modernism’s relationship to today’s Contemporary artists, Cincinnati Art
Museum in 2016 will present the traveling show MetaModern. It is organized by Krannert
Art Museum at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in
collaboration with curatorsquared of Winter Park, Florida, and Boston. In Cincinnati, it will be curated by Amy
Dehan, Decorative arts and Design curator, and Matt Distel, adjunct Contemporary
curator.According to the website
of the Krannert, where the show opens on Jan. 30, the
participating artists “adopt the actual vocabulary of the modern movement to
question the content of style and its relationship to history. Their work
challenges the tenets of modernism head-on. Some of them recast iconic forms in
materials that inherently question the precepts of the originals.”
Among the 20 international artists are several
familiar names to Cincinnati Art Museum visitors — Jill Magid, whose videos are
in the current Eyes on the Street
exhibit, and photographer James Welling, subject of a 2013 exhibit. Other
participating artists include Terence Gower, Conrad Bakker, Edgar Orlaineta,
Gabriel Sierra, Kendell Carter and Fernanda Fragateiro and Barbara Visser.
In Cincinnati, the curators plan to borrow Mid-Century Modern design
objects and graphic works from local collections to show with the traveling
exhibit’s new art that, in essence, comments upon the older work.
Thus, the show here will connect Modernism with today’s (Postmodern)
Contemporary art. The local curators also hope the show educates the public
that Cincinnati has a strong tradition of support for Modernist art, design and
architecture, which is now enjoying a revival
The tentative dates for the Cincinnati exhibition are June 18 to Sept.
11, 2016. Other cities planning to present the exhibit are Scottsdale, Ariz., Orlando, Fla.,
Palm Springs, Calif., and Marquette, Mich. (home of Northern Michigan University).

National Gallery, the latest film by the great
American documentarian Frederick Wiseman, will get a free screening at
Cincinnati Art Museum at 1 p.m. on Jan. 25, 2015. No tickets or advance
reservations are required.
Typical of
Wiseman’s inquisitively reportorial and humanistic work, this carefully and
thoughtfully takes viewers inside the world of London’s National Gallery — one
of the world’s finest museums. The film is three hours long.
Wiseman,
who is 84, has been making films that carefully examine societal institutions —
cultural, social, educational, medical and political — since his 1967 landmark Titicut Follies, about life inside the
Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane in Massachusetts.
His
much-lauded more recent films — which did not have a showcase theatrical screening
in Cincinnati — include last year’s At
Berkeley and 2009’s La Danse,
about the Paris Opera Ballet.
That National Gallery will be presented in a
theater here — the art museum’s auditorium holds some 300 — shows the ambition
of the museum’s associate photography curator, Brian Sholis, to offer more and
a wider variety of films as part of his programming.
A lower-profile
(compared to National Gallery) presentation
last Sunday of a new documentary about digital photography, Harvey Wang’s From Darkroom to Daylight, brought a
surprisingly good turnout of 55 people to the art museum’s library.

Benedict Leca, a much-liked curator of European Art at
Cincinnati Art Museum whose departure in 2012 to become chief curator at
Hamilton, Ontario's, Art Gallery of Hamilton prompted protest, has
moved again. It's a promotion. Perhaps his greatest accomplishment at Cincinnati was organizing Thomas Gainsborough and the Modern Woman. Here are a few paragraphs from the press release from the Redwood Library & Athenaeum of
Newport, R.I. It is especially notable for the fact the erudite Leca use
the term dix-huitièmiste to describe himself in a quote — how many other museum directors would do that?Edwin G. Fischer, M.D., President of the Board of Directors of
the Redwood Library & Athenæum, announced the appointment of
Benedict Leca, Ph.D., as its new Executive Director, effective January 15, 2015, following a competitive national search. “This
is tremendous news for the Redwood,” stated Dr. Fischer, “An expert in
18th-century art, history, and material culture, Benedict is uniquely
qualified to move the Library into the national spotlight as a center of
thought and culture. He has a wealth of experience and is extremely
well-suited to lead this 268-year old cultural institution.” As
Executive Director, Leca will articulate and advance the Redwood’s
historic mission as a hybrid cultural institution with “nothing in view
but the good of mankind.” Building on the Redwood’s unique position as a
catalyst for dialogues about education across periods and disciplines,
Leca’s work will focus on fully realizing the opportunities inherent to
the athenæum model through an expanded array of public programs, forums,
and exhibitions—both on-site and on-line—that will foster networks of
intellectual exchange locally, regionally, and around the world. Prior
to his current tenure at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ontario, as Chief
Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs (2012-14), Leca was Curator
of European Painting, Sculpture and Drawings at the Cincinnati Art
Museum. He was the first
Andrew Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in the French Paintings department at
the National Gallery of Art in Washington (2003-2007), and served on
the staff of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University (1999-2000). Mr.
Leca also currently holds the position of Adjunct Assistant Professor of
Art History in the School of the Arts, McMaster University in Hamilton,
Ontario. Mr. Leca has
curated many important exhibitions: Charles-Nicolas Cochin: Draftsman of
the Enlightenment (2003); Rembrandt: Three Faces of the Master (2008);
Thomas Gainsborough and the Modern Woman (2010—2011); Monet in Giverny:
Landscapes of Reflection (2012); The Painter Pictured: French
Nineteenth-Century Paintings and Portrait Photographs (2013); the
current The World is an Apple: The Still Lifes of Paul Cézanne, executed
in partnership with the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia (2014-15), and
the forthcoming Illuminations: Italian Baroque Masterworks in Canadian
Collections to be held at the Art Gallery of Hamilton and the Art
Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton, in 2015.(Thanks to Judith H. Dobrzynski's Real Clear Arts blog at http://www.artsjournal.com/realcleararts/ for alerting us to this story.)

For Eyes on the Street, Cincinnati
Art Museum’s contribution to the FotoFocus Biennial, curator Brian
Sholis set out to do something more than just display still photographs
and short films/videos that he liked.

Tom Wesselmann’s Pop art gets its chance to astound

As the long-awaited Beyond Pop Art: A Tom Wesselmann Retrospective
prepares to open Friday at Cincinnati Art Museum, there is much to
discuss about this native son’s controversial career as one of the
original Pop artists.

Last night,
British photographer Paul Graham presented his FotoFocus-sponsored lecture at
Cincinnati Art Museum. Graham’s work is in two of FotoFocus’ featured
exhibitions — the museum’s Eyes on the
Street and the Stills show at
Downtown’s Michael Lowe Gallery. Eyes on
the Street is up until Jan. 4; Stills
closes Nov. 1.
Graham’s
work is related to but updates classic street photography in that, based on
what he said last night, he seeks out subtle shots rather than what he calls
“clichéd” or obviously dramatic images. He tries to build haiku-like, enigmatic
visual sequences that in their small details cumulatively provide insight. (That
said, he did show slides from a recent series that features rainbows.)
It’s a
difficult task not always easily evident to the viewer, but he expressed his
purpose eloquently last night and repeatedly mentioned those whose work
inspired him — Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand. For those moved by
his work, there’s a Where’s Waldo quality to “reading” the smallest details —
the color of a tie or T-shirt, the positioning of a pedestrian on a street, the
relationship of the camera angle to a storefront sign, the choices in focus.
This is
particularly noticeable in his recent The
Present series of New York street life, from which the Cincinnati-displayed
photos come. “It’s the theater of the street, the theater of life coming at you,”
he said. He also prefers that his framed prints be mounted on a gallery wall
close to the floor, to approximate sidewalk level. But he acknowledged last
night that the Stills show did not do
that, and he enjoyed being able to see his photos at more normal eye level.
His The Present photos in Eyes on the Street capture the results of bold action or drama,
a rarity for him, in that a woman has fallen on the sidewalk while others move
toward her.
Meanwhile
last night, the museum’s associate curator of photography, Brian Sholis, distributed
announcements of two additional events connected to the current Eyes on the Street show: a Nov. 5
panel discussion at 7 p.m. about Eyes on
the Street at Niehoff Urban Studio, University of Cincinnati, 2728 (Short)
Vine St.; and a Nov.
19 conversation at 7 p.m. on “Art and Privacy” featuring Cincinnati Police
Chief Jeffrey Blackwell and civil-rights lawyer Alphonse Gerhardstein. It’s at the
museum’s Fath Auditorium.
Go here for more
information.